New LDS Music Resource: Facebook Page

As an LDS* musician, I'm excited about the new church initiative: the LDS Music Team Facebook Page.

(* LDS refers to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.)

This new page is meant to be a community for LDS musicians to share music ideas, train each other, and to help meet the musical needs of each ward/branch.

I invite my fellow LDS musicians to check out the Facebook page and start participating.  To get all the updates (posts by "The LDS Music Team - USA"), make sure to Like the page at the very top.

To see the community posts you must go to the page itself and click on "Recent Posts by Others" off to the right side of the Timeline near the top:

Click on "See All" and it will show all the community posts.

Enjoy, tell your friends, and let's make something out of this.

Video of the Week: John Adams--Phrygian Gates

This week I'll post somebody else's music.  John Adams is one of my favorite living composers.  He's considered to be a minimalist composer, of which I find to be one of the most energetic.

This is one of his piano pieces.  It's a long one, but this performance (and visuals) by Ian Houghton is a good one, and I hope it will help introduce you to a new kind of music.

Video of the Week: Little Sonatina #3

This week, I'll finish out the trio of Little Sonatinas.  I completed this when I was around 21, and overall I think it's the best of the three sonatinas.

The second movement is something I wrote without the piano while on my mission in Korea.  A friend asked me to compose something for his memory book, so I did.

Half Rests vs. Whole Rests

In teaching my daughter how to play the piano, the topic of the week was to introduce the half rest.  But how do you teach the difference between a half rest (which lasts two beats) and a whole rest (which usually lasts four)?  If you look at this graphic, they look very similar:

The only difference is that one rest is on top of a line, and the other is below a line.  But which is which?

Easy--I came up with this mnemonic:

"If you don't whole-d on, you'll half to rest."

See?  The whole rest is "holding" on the the line above it, and half rests just "have" to rest on the line below it.

There you have it.  Now you know the difference and you can teach others.

Video of the Week: Little Sonatina #2

This week I'll continue with another Little Sonatina.  I was roughly 21 when I finished these three short movements.  Enjoy!

(Note: Youtube appears to be having troubles the last couple of days with their buttons and thumbnails not loading -- on Macs?  I had to use my ingenuity and html skills to put together the right code to embed this video.  I'm smarter than Google/Youtube!)

Video of the Week: Little Sonatina #1

Here is my first "music video of the week."  It's simple.  It's short.

I composed this in high school.  The girls loved it.  Yeah, music!

Tune in every week for more videos.

Introducing the Music of Mel

Hello world ... again.

I'm happy to introduce my new blog.  This one is all about music.  My goal is to promote my own music and talk about music in general.

I hope you enjoy.